The Happy Place
It was late September, and Hugh and I were in Amsterdam. We’d been invited out for dinner, so at five o’clock we left our hotel and took an alarming one-hundred-twenty-dollar cab ride to the home of our hostess, a children’s book author who lived beside a canal in the middle of nowhere. By the time we arrived, it was dark. Someone opened the door to greet us, and it took me a moment to realize it was Francine. Obscuring her face were two clear plastic bags filled with water. Both were suspended by strings, just sort of sagging there, like testicles. I, of course, asked about them, and she said they were for keeping the flies away. “I don’t know what it is, but they see or sense these sandwich bags and immediately head off in another direction. Isn’t that right, Pauline?” Francine said to her girlfriend. “Not one fly all summer, and usually the house is full of them.”
I planned to think about the plastic bags of water for the remainder of the evening, but other stuff kept getting in the way—Francine’s house, for one, which was really more of a compound: the Francine Institute, with a big modern space for writing, and a separate alcove for the dozens of books she’s authored, and all the products these books have generated, the dolls and posters and calendars.
Dinner was taken in the backyard beside the canal. It was a clear night, cold enough to see our breath, and a fire was burning. Joining us were Pauline, Francine’s ex-husband, and one of their sons, a twenty-year-old named Dan. Like his mother, he was blond, with the sort of looks we all might have were we allowed to construct ourselves from a kit: perfectly spaced blue eyes, perfect cheekbones, a perfect mouthful of big white teeth. On top of that he was really kind and interesting. After dinner we moved our chairs into a circle around the fire pit and were served apple cake. Hugh asked a question about the economy, and Dan explained that the Netherlands has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. “As long as you get a master’s degree you’re pretty much guaranteed a job.” He himself was in his second year of college, majoring in saving the Earth. “That’s not the actual name of the program, but it’s pretty much what it amounts to,” he told us.
I asked what sort of things he was learning, and he brought up a biology class he’d sat through earlier that week. “We were talking about aging and how the average life expectancy keeps creeping upward. It used to be that people died in their midthirties,
but now look at us! And it’s all changing so quickly.” Dan said that the first person who’ll reach the age of two hundred has already been born. “It’s anyone’s guess who it is, but he or she is definitely here.”
It could have been the authority in his voice, or maybe the firelight reflected in his eyes, but for whatever reason, this sounded to me like a prophecy. I swallowed the last of my cake and leaned forward to ask a question. “At the age of a hundred sixty, will this person be like, ‘You know what? I’m starting to feel a little tired,’ or will he be curled into a ball, puddled in drool and Botox?”
“We don’t know,” Dan said.
I stared into the flames and got a sickening feeling that the person we were talking about would turn out to be my father. And that I would be the one left to care for him. Think of the plastic bags of water hanging in the doorway, I told myself, but try as I might, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, not then, shivering beside the dark canal, and not later, on our way back to Amsterdam. The taxi meter clicked ever upward, and I saw the figures as ages rather than sums, thinking, Sixty-six, that’s like being in your twenties. Sixty-seven, that’s still nothing. When I’m sixty-seven my father will be a mere one hundred years old.
That would leave him a whole other century to call at odd hours and ask if I’d gotten a colonoscopy. This is a campaign he started in 1978, the first time he had one. “It was horrible,” he reported. “The doctor made me take my pants off and strapped me into a kind of bottomless chair—tethered me like a hostage. Then he tipped it forward and stuck, no kidding, a three-foot metal rod up my ass! Can you imagine? There I was, begging for mercy. Turned practically upside down, sweat dripping off my nose, I mean to tell you it was just god-awful, like torture. The single worst experience of my entire life.” Then, in the same breath, he added, “I think you should get one.”
“But I’m only twenty-two years old!”
“It’s never too early,” he told me. “Go on. I’ll pay for it myself.”
I said to my sister Lisa, “It’s like he thinks I’ll enjoy it.”
I’d heard the procedure was easier now than it was in the late ’70s. Rather than being strapped into a chair, you lie on your side, doped to the gills, while a slender tentacle no thicker than packing twine meanders the empty corridors of your colon. “It couldn’t be simpler,” a doctor promised me. “We knock you out, and you wake up remembering nothing.”
“Nothing about you doing God knows what inside my asshole?” I said. “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound very reassuring to me.”
“You’re a ticking time bomb,” my father said. “Mark my words, you wait much longer and you’re going to regret it.”
When I hit fifty he doubled his efforts. He doubled them again the following year, and then it was basically all he ever talked about. I had oral surgery in the summer of 2010 and had just returned from the periodontist, my mouth still numb and leaking blood onto my chin, when the phone rang. “Seeing as that’s done, I want you to get a colonoscopy,” my father said.
I took him with me to a college in New York where I was to give the commencement address, and just before I went onstage he tapped me on the shoulder. “I want you to think about getting a colonoscopy.”
He worked it into every conversation we had. The one after I returned from Amsterdam, for instance, when I called to ask what he wanted for Christmas. “I want for you to get a goddamn colonoscopy.”
“You want your gift to be someone sticking a foreign object up my ass?”
“You’re damn right I do.” He continued to hammer at it until, exhausted, I told him I couldn’t talk anymore. We hung up, and two minutes later he called again.
“Or an iPhone.”
When I think of it, he’s actually not a bad candidate for two hundred. Here he is, eighty-nine years old, and he’s never once spent a night in the hospital. Four times a week he attends a spinning class at the Y, this in addition to a great deal of walking and dragging things around. His memory is excellent. He does all his own shopping and
“Blond or dark?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Could I possibly cut out the gin part? Marinate them in, I don’t know, coffee or something.”
“Do you want to live or don’t you?” he asked.
When I told my father about Dan’s prophecy, he said, “Aw, baloney. A twenty-year-old kid in Holland, what does he know?”
“He learned it in school.”
“No, he didn’t,” my father said. “The guy was just pulling your leg.” He had a similaropinion of the plastic bags hanging in Francine’s doorway. “It’s just a load of BS.”
“As opposed to seven gin-soaked raisins keeping you alive until you’re eighty-nine?”
“Hey,” he said, “those raisins work!”
If not them, something was doing the trick. He harassed me with the energy of a man half his age until finally, six months after our trip to Amsterdam, I cracked. I was in the United States at the time, in the midst of a thirty-day, thirty-city tour. Once it was over, I planned on visiting my family, and, figuring I’d just be sitting around anyway, I called a North Carolina endoscopy center and made an appointment. The place I chose was not in Raleigh—my father would have insisted on watching—but in Winston-Salem, where Lisa lives.
Booking the procedure two weeks in advance left me plenty of time to collect stories, both good and bad. The part maligned by just about everyone was the preparation. In order for your colon to be properly studied, it has to be empty. To achieve this, you are prescribed a horrific combination of laxatives and stool softeners that essentially chains you to the toilet for a period of twelve to eighteen hours. Some of the people I spoke with had remained conscious during their colonoscopies and had even joined their doctors in watching the footage live on the monitor. These tended to be the same types who did their own taxes and read Consumer Reports before buying a dehumidifier or toaster oven. They were, in effect, the types I am not.
As long as somebody knocked me out, I felt that I’d be okay. Then I met a woman who took my fragile peace of mind and shattered it. “The camera up the bottom part was not so bad,” she reported. “I was out cold while all that happened, but then I was wheeled into what was called ‘the farting room’ and told I couldn’t leave until I had passed enough gas to satisfy them.”
“No!” I said.
“They inflate your colon with air, and you absolutely have to get it out before going home,” she told me. “I had a nurse literally pressing on my stomach like she was kneading dough.”
“And you had to do that…in front of people?”
She closed her eyes and nodded.
“I can’t,” I told her.
“But you’ll have to!”
“No, seriously. I can’t.”
“I didn’t have a farting room,” Lisa said when I repeated the woman’s story. “At least it wasn’t written on the door. And you might think it’s crazy, but I loved my colonoscopy.” Without my sister’s enthusiasm I might have canceled my appointment. As it was, she could not have been more helpful or encouraging. The day before my procedure, she gave me my laxatives and poured my first glass of Gatorade mixed with stool softener. I drank the required thirty-two ounces, I suffered the effects, and the next morning I forced down another bottle. I’d thought that going without solid food for a total of twenty-fou